Pages

Saturday, 28 January 2017

I’ve always enjoyed writing but you may be amazed to learn, I’m not
so much of a reader. I used to skip parts of high school reading
assignments because reading would put me to sleep. I started writing
when I was a teenager on a sci-fi time story but couldn’t finish because of my
lack in knowledge about government affairs in cold war time. Once I
stopped I got busy with jobs I held and life in general until
2006/7 when I wrote a totally new sci-fi book of science fiction and real time
science mix together in a time traveler adventure story, The Traveler the beginning, which is out now.

My writing schedule is sporadic. Unfortunately, with
my almost always weekly changing work schedule I have no structured
writing schedule so I can go weeks and months without doing a single thing and
then I get a weekend or week of down time and, wham, I may write entire chapters all at once.

Publication has been a long, sometimes tedious and unfulfilling
road with a lot of disappointment -much of it was caused by my former
publisher. Looking back, after I spent around a year of researching what I
needed to know about Indie publication vs. publishers vs. using
agents I still didn’t know nearly enough. While I was searching for a
publisher and found a Christian based place whom I called. We made a deal and
arrangements for the books but over time I started to see a trend at the
publisher who really wasn’t helping much since the books went public. A
year and a half into it I fought to market myself and do mostly everything
including foot huge multi-thousand dollar bills to get known while trying
to balance life, several family tragedies and an ever-changing monthly career schedule.
It’s taught me a lot, which I believe as a Charismatic Christian and author I
probably needed as part of a great future that is still being written! Because
of the hard road I was forced to take I believe I will be able to offer my
reading fans someone awesome surprises in the future – which I am currently in
progress of now. Hint, hint!

I have two other books in progress right now – a Christian
fiction and another sci-fi. With God’s help I plan to complete these very
soon. I’ve already done the leg work to lower my EBook prices from where the
publisher had them and I am dedicated to the readers to make them more
easily attainable by everyone worldwide. There’s also a new website coming
February 2017!

My future plan is to commit to writing full time and get myself
out of the eighteen-year computer and networking career that I am currently
working in.

One favorite thing I
enjoy is doing the book autograph signing events. It’s that excitement of
seeing the person’s face after we’ve talked some about their lives, the book and
about me. Second, I think once I’ve finally written the book as well and
completely as I can before it goes to someone to edit and I see how the
entire story has run its course - that makes the time and effort worthwhile.

When I’m not working or
writing, I like to watch the Sci-Fi channel, documentaries or science shows on
T.V. and attending family get-togethers like cookouts and birthday parties and
other events.

There are two books currently out in EBook format. I am pleased
to include a brief few paragraphs from them both here thanks to my interview
host.My inspired non-fiction Christian
book “Life Explained a Journey to Selfless Love”;

I was a
little unsure where to begin and how to open this book in a way that would grab
the reader’s attention, so as I wrote this sentence, I just placed it into the
hands of the Lord, that He would write it for me and through me. I wanted to
allow him to be in control without taking a chance that my limited human
knowledge and abilities would ruin the content of the subject matter of these
very important chapters.

Health and
longevity of life ties to quality of life, and that’s something we all need and
many of us feel we are deserving of. The Bible references long life and quality
of life as being tied together and tied to keeping of the Old Testament and New
Testament scripture readings. Some of you are saying, “This is absolutely true
and for real,” and you have seen firsthand accounts of it and the results of
keeping up with it consistently. Now there’s the other half of you who are
partially or even totally against it. Keep reading on. I personally have seen
the results, speaking as a person who was raised Catholic and a churchgoer but
who would waver or fall away, as they say, because I would allow life, work
schedules, and my laziness to interfere and draw me away. Many fall prey to
that because we are submerged in a lifestyle of desiring things that are
pulling us in multiple directions daily.

“Enter
through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad the leads to
destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and
the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few that find it.” (Matt.
7:13–15, nasb)

The path is
selfless love and commitment to the God, who is love itself.

By the time
I reached my late forties, life had taken a toll on me, as it does to us all,
causing us to harden ourselves to survive; even if we remain good people, after
decades on this planet, we lose our true selves. We lose part of the humanity
the Lord designed for us to have. I took time to help people, tried not to
break the law, and obeyed my parents, for the most part, and all those things
that supposedly make us nice people. Like many of you, I worked hard and
remained vigilant to my beliefs and responsibilities to myself, family,
friends, job, and other life-related things. One night as I was going to bed, I
knelt beside the bed and cried out to the Lord, “I give up! I can’t do this
anymore. It’s too hard. Like a broken record, life problems and struggles keep
coming back over and over again. I need help. Lord, I need your help. I will
put you first above everyone and everything— over work, family, friends,
everything—and never stop!” …

And for “The Traveler
the Beginning” the sci-fi time traveler adventure story;

I sit
alone in my home, shielded from the outside world, abandoned by many of my
people and hounded by many others. I can hear the sounds of militant forces
encroaching into my personal living space. They are in need of answers to
questions they are not yet prepared to deal with. I am an outlaw in their eyes,
cut off by my own actions. The innocent actions that began a journey of wonder
and enlightenment have now forced me into my seclusion. The sounds of
helicopters fade in and out as they swoop in, checking the perimeter of my
yard, my confines, in hopes of my capture. In the far distance, across my long
yard, television and radio crews line the street beyond the boundaries of my
property line in either direction. The once-tranquil neighborhood where I live
has turned into a form of a battle zone, a mockery of my achievements and
significant contributions to mankind’s continuation. It’s still here, an almost
deafening silence resounding through the back of my mind while I sit and watch
their unrelenting advancements. Outside troops mass on the lawn. Jeeps, men,
and tanks tear up my gardens. Bullhorns and walkie-talkies echo orders from
commanding officers to penetrate my home and bring me out by force. I am not a
criminal and thus will fight to the end for my freedom. The shields are
impenetrable to their efforts to reach me, shy of digging deep into my grass
and tunneling under the protective barricade I have erected around my home.
Over and over they call for me to come out. It’s been going on now for several
hours. The year is 2052.

I
believe I need take you to the start of my adventures to give you a better
perspective of why this is.

The
pages you are about to read are taken from my memoirs. An extraordinary event
has unfolded itself onto me as part of my own undertaking, an event that
captured the minds and hearts of a tiny planet located in a solar system just
as small in proportion. I have been time traveling now for a total of 1,500
years, though I am now only sixty-five years old. Much of this time was spent
in various centuries living new lives and learning new cultures. I speak over
forty languages and fifteen different dialects from this planet alone. In my
adventures of time traveling, I have been to the future and to the past. I have
been through many dangerous and terrible times, seen so much beauty and
glory—more than my words can begin to describe— and beings the like of which my
imagination couldn’t begin to fathom…

Thank you Michael for being our guest this week.

Please check the links below to discover more about Michael and his writing.

Saturday, 21 January 2017

The Scribbler is happy to have Tina Frisco return as a guest this week. She lives in California and is a very generous participant, not only in sharing her thoughts about her own writing as well as advice on being an author. She is a relentless promoter of other authors as well. This is Tina's second visit to SBS. She talks about her latest work and shares an excerpt from her novel, Vampyrie. Her first visit can be seen here.Her links are below.

First let me say that Vampyrie is not your typical vampire novel. It’s based in science and brings the
myth of the vampire into the realm of possibility. Although Vampyrie is not part of a series, two
primary characters from my first novel, Plateau,play major roles. In this excerpt, Phoebe,
the protagonist in Vampyrie, has just
met one of these characters in the catacombs. W’Hyani has told Phoebe that
she’s there looking for her mate who didn’t return home to their village after
his vision quest. Phoebe is in the catacombs searching for two of her friends
who went missing. She’s sure they were abducted and brought to this infernal
domain. Coming from two different cultures, Phoebe and W’Hyani had a bit of an
awkward introduction; but the gifts they exchanged and their common goal
quickly united them.

Abyss
of Doom

Phoebe
and W’Hyani walked stealthily side by side, each keeping close to the tunnel
wall and holding her torch in her outer hand. It seemed they’d been walking
forever with no end in sight.

“It can’t be much farther,” Phoebe whispered.

“Look; a forked tongue.” W’Hyani pointed up ahead.
“We have been walking in a circle.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am certain. Follow me and I will show you.”
They hadn’t walked five yards when she extended her torch to the right. “Do you
see? It is the other side of the passage.”

Hoping W’Hyani was wrong, Phoebe walked a few more
yards and stepped into the same large open area from where she’d started. “Damn
it!” She clamped her hand over her mouth. Cursing doesn’t lend itself to
whispering.

“We have taken the wrong path. We must now walk
into the wind.”

Feeling a cool breeze blowing from the west arm of
the main tunnel, Phoebe assumed it was the direction to which W’Hyani referred.
It also was the direction she should have taken instead of diverting to the
smaller passage.

W’Hyani laid her torch on the ground and turned
toward Phoebe.

“Give to me the feather. You must wear it. It will
give you much strength.”

She took a piece of sinew from her pouch, secured
it around the feather’s calamus, and tied it to several strands of Phoebe’s
hair above her left ear. She placed her hands on Phoebe’s shoulders and touched
her forehead to her own. Then she drew an arrow from her quiver and readied her
bow. Phoebe noticed the arrowheads were carved from raw silver instead of
stone.

“Now we are ready.” W’Hyani kicked her torch to the wall. “I cannot carry the lalaque when
I shoot the arrow. The fire from yours will give us light.” She put her hand on
Phoebe’s shoulder and looked her in the eye. “When you kick and punch,
aim for the heart. That is where they are weak.”

“How do you know this?” Although inclined to trust
her new friend, Phoebe had to be sure W’Hyani knew what she was talking about.

“The kind woman who spoke of the underground told
to me, ‘If he is in the tunnels, beware. The beings that live there are evil
and difficult to fight. You must aim for the heart.’ I do not know who she was
or for what reason she said this, but I know it is a truth.”

Maybe it was the confidence in W’Hyani’s voice.
Maybe it was the fact they had nothing to lose by making a plan – any plan – of
attack. Whatever it was, Phoebe trusted W’Hyani’s words.

“Okay; what else?”

“If they have not yet feasted, a blow to the heart
will knock them down. Then you jump on the chest with both feet and pierce the
heart with the ribs. I do not know if this will kill them, but it will stop
them and I will have a target that does not move. And you must remember: They
are very fast.”

Phoebe understood. They’d work as a team. She’d
knock the rogues down and W’Hyani would shoot an arrow through their heart. As
she wondered how this would work if a lot of rogues attacked at once, W’Hyani
answered the question.

“If they attack in a clan, you dodge and weave and
fly low between their legs. Quickly turn on your back and kick with two legs
together. Move your body round and round and keep kicking. I will shoot as fast
as I can. But we must keep apart, one from the other. This way, we confuse
them. We give them two targets to fight.”

Phoebe nodded in acknowledgement. Then she and W’Hyani
crept forward, hugging the wall opposite one another. They advanced no more
than a few yards when the torch was snatched from Phoebe’s hand and both young
women were yanked backward. A strong hand covered each of their mouths; a
strong arm forced each of them to keep still.

Thanks Tina for being our guest this week, it's always a treat to have you participate.

Saturday, 14 January 2017

SEUMAS GALLACHER escaped from the world of
finance seven years ago, after a career spanning three continents and five
decades.

As the self-professed 'oldest computer Jurassic
on the planet’, his headlong immersion into the dizzy world of eBook publishing
opened his eyes, mind, and pleasure to the joys of self-publishing. As a former
businessman, he rapidly understood the concept of a writer's need to 'build the
platform', and from a standing start began to develop a social networking
outreach, which now tops 30,000 direct contacts.

His 'Jack Calder' crime thriller series, THE
VIOLIN MAN'S LEGACY, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK, SAVAGE PAYBACK and KILLER CITY have
blown his mind with more than 90,000 e-link downloads to date. His fifth, DEADLY
IMPASSE was launched in late 2016.

He started a humorous, informative, self-publishers
blog three years ago, never having heard of a 'blog' prior to that, was voted
'Blogger of the Year 2013' and now has a loyal blog following on his networks.
He says the novels contain his 'Author's Voice', while the blog carries his
'Author's Brand'. And he's LUVVIN IT!

Links are listed below.

…the
loneliness of the long-distance scribbler…

…even the shyest of people need company
from time to time… hermits, real hermits, measure less than 0.00000648
percent of the WURLD’s population… cloistered monks and sisters
of the cloth in their monkeries and sisteries at least have the presence of
their own ilk round them on a constant basis… the brooding G.
Garbo and H. Hughes had lots of M. Money around them to alleviate their solitary exclusion of the rest of the
planet… which makes it apparent to me, Mabel, it is abnormal to ‘want to be alone’… yet, hundreds of thousands of
quill-scraper Lads and Lassies of Blog Land choose just such a devoted pathway…
yes, yeez can point to the Web, and all its SOSYAL NETWURKIN trappings… where at the click of yer mouse, yeez can be in touch with
twenty-five trillion people simultaneously… but, and it’s a big ‘but’... it’s not the same as being with people
in the flesh… the myriad virtual candlelit garrets wherein the scribing
successes of the future literary generation reside hold their own special
importance… being a writer is lonely… no-one else can sculpt the characters,
plots, nuances of yer own story-telling… it’s unique to each and every one of
yeez… I know I bang on occasionally here about the real WURK starting after yeez’ve finished yer masterpiece, in
getting it accepted in the Big Bad WURLD out there… that doesn’t detract from the
beauty and the adrenaline rush of actually typing ‘THE END’… yeez can try to share that feeling with
others … but it’s impossible for them to feel what yeez feel yerself at that
precise moment of conclusion… and all the heartache, all the pain, all the
angst, all the suffered loneliness of the long-distance Author, all
the alls… are worth every nano-second of this peculiar labour of love…
and then, fools that yeez are (me included), what do yeez do then?… yeez start
another one!… here’s a wee bit of this ol’ Scots Jurassic’s journey on that
solitary trail… eight years ago in Abu

Dhabi, where I was living and working, it struck me that it was just ‘time
for that book we all have in us’ to emerge from what’s left of my wee
grey cells… and of course I had a full story and narrative ready to leap onto
virgin pages, right?… wrong!... not a hint of it!... I decided to go walking
for an hour and a half, ten evenings in succession, along the water’s edge of
the Corniche in that excellent city, thinking of what kinda masterpiece I
should produce… after the first couple of nights, an ending crystallized… it
gave me a target toward which to write… and that’s how I’ve done all of my
books since… the expected route to that ending changed several times as, first,
a main plot theme, and then a secondary, and a tertiary began to interweave and
push themselves into the frame… being the oldest self-confessed computer
Jurassic on the planet, I purchased my first ever laptop at the age of sixty
(my age, not the laptop’s), and perfected the one-finger-from-each-hand typing
technique… it hardly encourages smoke trails from the keyboard at that speed,
but hey, it does give me time to mull what I’m typing as I go along… positivity
in everything, Mabel!... in a few months, THE
VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY was ready to breach birth into the heady universe of
publishing… in due expectation of a million-dollar contract by return post, I
packed off forty solicitations to agents in the UK, and sat back, envisioning
the Ferrari salesmen, and Caribbean vacations that this soon-to-be iconic
author would have to indulge…

...however, with that twisted sense of humour
and perfect balance that the Literary Gods seem to possess, back came precisely
forty rejection slips… it mattered not a jot to my ego… because by that time,
the second book, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK
was marching its way across the laptop… around the same time, a friend
suggested as a self-publishing option, I should consider the Amazon
Kindle channel… I instantly responded, ‘Great… but, what’s Kindle?’…
I hadn’t a clue… but learned very quickly the how and what of becoming an indie
author… and for emb’dy reading this who’s just starting on this wunnerful
mystery tour, let me tell yeez, if this ol’ fella can do it, emb’dy can… go for
it… as it happened, by the time the second novel was ready to launch, the first
baby already had attracted 8,000 downloads… and that just blew my mind… now,
how did that happen?... by the best coincidence, I was following then nouveau
indie authoress Rachel

Abbott’s blog
in which she advised to treat the writing as a ‘business’… recognizing the
scribbling as the comparatively easy part… the rest of the ‘business’ entailed
marketing and promotion, budgeting time and whatever money yeez wanted to
invest in it, cover art, proofreading, editing, and the whole nine yards… as a
businessman, all of that made superb sense to me, and I embraced the philosophy
with both hands… I began to ‘build the platform’ of
relationships to support the ‘business’… being present on the SOSYAL NETWURKS is mandatory for modern
authors in my not-so-‘umble opinion… but harvesting such as Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ ‘followers ‘ and ‘friends’ who relate to
the writing, reading and related publishing fields… and not just acquiring
these links for the sake of numbers… my links totalled a mere 400 when I
started to develop that ‘platform’… they now exceed 30,000…
the next epiphany was the value of having a blog… I write a regular blog which
was basically the mumbled sharings of a new writer, bumbling and stumbling his
way into the industry… it branched out to cover other light-hearted elements… I’ve
found that the blog posts of others which I enjoy are those which entertain,
educate, enlighten and often empathize with me… I loosely modelled my own blog
after those… and here’s the real beauty of that… all of my blog posts are
automatically linked to every one of my SOSYAL
NETWURKS, meaning that each post is sent out to more than 30,000 potential
readers… the blog is also a marvelous way of inviting Guest Blog Posts from
others, be they writers, or otherwise… and an absolute tenet is to help other
authors wherever I can… giving back some of the unbelievable support and love
that has been unconditionally shown to me… so, in that sense, mingling, even in
the Webosphere, offsets the solitary trudge of most of we penspeople… however
the creative
Muse operates best for me in that isolated environment of my own virtual candlelit
garret… pass me my candelabrum, Mabel, I’ve my next masterpiece to write … see
yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

Saturday, 7 January 2017

One of my favored authors is the guest this week on the Scribbler. So excited to have Beth Powning answer questions for the 4Q Interview.

Beth was born in 1949. She
graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, where she majored in creative
writing, studying with novelist E.L.Doctorow. She immigrated to Canada in 1972
with her artist husband, Peter Powning. Since then, she and Peter have lived on
a farm in Markhamville, New Brunswick, where they grow much of their own food
in organic gardens. They have one son, Jake Powning, who lives nearby with his
wife, Sara, and two granddaughters. Beth Powning photographed two gardening
books before publishing her own first book in 1995, Seeds of

Another Summer (Penguin) published in the US as Home – Chronicle of a North Country Life (writing
and photograpy), recently re-released by Goose Lane Editions.She went on to write Shadow Child (Penguin Canada - subsequently re-issued by Knopf
Canada, short-listed for the Edna Staebler Award for Literary Non-fiction); The Hatbox Letters (Knopf Canada, a
best-seller and long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Award);Edge
Seasons (Knopf, a Globe and Mail Best Book) and The Sea Captain’s Wife (best-selling novel, long-listed for the
Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and short-listed for the Thomas Head Raddall
Atlantic Fiction Award). This novel was published in French in 2014 by Editions
Perce Neige. Her latest novel, A Measure
of Light, Knopf Canada, March 2015, was a

Globe and Mail Best Book, was
long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award and won the N.B. Award
for Fiction. Her work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies,
and she has made many appearances across Canada and in the U.S., Ireland and
Great Britain. She was the recipient of New Brunswick’s 2010 Lieutenant
Governor’s Award for English Literary Arts, and in 2014 received an honorary Doctorate
of Letters degree from the University of New Brunswick. She is active in her
community, serving on boards and committees. Her newsletters and photography
can be seen at www.powning.com/beth.

4Q: I’m a
big fan of your novels and it is a real treat to have you as a guest Beth. Your
attention to detail and place is a true art. When an idea for a story comes
along, what are your writing habits?Do
you outline or just sit and write?

Usually I explore and discard
two or three ideas before finally finding the one that is going to work.
Sometimes I will write 40-50 pages of something and then know that it’s not
going anywhere. I go back to dreaming, scribbling ideas in my journal, keeping
my mind open, waiting for that unmistakable prickle of excitement. The idea that finally becomes a book is
usually something that I have written many pages about in my journal,
describing the project to myself. My next step will be to study— in the case of
my last two novels, at least a full year. When I am ready to write, I know it
because I am thoroughly sick of the research and long to enter the story. I
simply begin. The novelist E. L.
Doctorow, my beloved teacher and mentor, said to his writing students— “You
don’t need to begin at the beginning. Start anywhere.” The place I begin
writing seldom becomes the actual first sentence of the book. I know that the
first draft will be subject to many revisions, so I dive in, flailing about. I don’t
know how the book is going to develop; I never have a plot line. If I wrote
from an outline, I would not feel as if I were on a quest, a journey. I need to
be surprised by what happens. A novel to me is like a question to which I don’t
know the answer. I write to find out the answer, I write to take the journey, I
write to live in the world that I’m creating.

4Q: There’s
been a lot of attention and praise for your latest novel, A Measure of Light
and I truly enjoyed the book but my favorite is The Sea Captain’s Wife, both of
which are historical. Is this a favorite genre for you?

I was asked this question by
someone else, recently, and it made me realize the extent to which I was
influenced by E. L. Doctorow. All of his novels are fictions built around
actual historical events. I grew with houses built in the 18thand 19thcenturies, my own childhood house as well as
the houses of my grandparents. They were filled with rope-strung beds, creaky
floorboards, musty linens. I was surrounded by tangible evidence of the past,
so it’s not surprising that history crept into my first novel, hatboxes filled
with letters that land in Kate’s living room, whose unexpected stories help her
to move forward after her husband’s death. The next two novels were complete
surprises to me, and came after stumbling on facts that astonished me and made
me aware of my own ignorance and desire to learn. I didn’t know that women went
to sea with their captain husbands. I had never heard of Mary Dyer nor knew
that people had been coldly hanged for their religious beliefs in New England. These
facts inhabited compelling stories, stories that I felt needed to be told.
Doctorow was one of the first novelists to blur the line between historical
fiction and literary fiction. These days, many novels blend history and
fiction. I love history, I love learning about history by reading novels. I
consider my novels to be literary fiction.

4Q: Some of
your earlier works have been inspired by memories. I especially enjoyed Edge
Seasons – A Mid-Life year. Please share a childhood memory or anecdote.

My memories are vivid and
visceral. I remember the iridescent blur of wasps’ wings, sluggish on the
sundrenched windowsills of my childhood home. And the sound of the six o-clock bedtime
train—the improbable clackety-clack of its wheels as it snaked, hidden, through
the dense valley trees. In 1958, when I was nine, most of my friends had
televisions, but my parents refused to buy one. I created places to read, like
the alternate worlds that I now inhabit when I write. One was a place of many
blankets, chair-draped, with a table lamp and pillows, created over the hot-air
register, in winter. Another was a tree-house, built by me and my brother (we
had several), a platform of boards wedged across branches. One was on what we
called “The Indian Rock,” a massive boulder in our horse pasture with a smooth
and mysterious oval bowl which we thought had been made by hand-grinding corn. One
unfortunate one was built on the ground behind the vegetable garden out of hay
bales, where I left a pile of library books in a rainstorm. And under the oak
tree that I wrote about in Home was a
shipping crate in which my grandparents had sent home all their belongings when
they sold their home in Bermuda; its drafty plywood walls enclosed me and my
beloved books and the worlds inside them. I carried on a third-person dialogue
inside my head, a constant internal monologue that described me to me. “It was getting late, so she started home across the fields.”
Only after I spent a two-week vacation with a friend did I lose this habit, and
then I mourned it.

4Q: What’s
next for Beth Powning the author?

I’ve just finished the first
draft of a new novel. It takes place in New Brunswick, time-present, with (of
course!) a historical thread wound through it. I am just now working through
it, editing, so that it reads smoothly enough for me to show to my agent,
Jackie Kaiser. Jackie is always my first reader. I usually don’t offer the
manuscript to my publishers until I have written three drafts, all of which she
reads and comments on. I’m very, very fortunate to have her. Gerard Collins and
I have formed a literary committee for our new arts and culture centre here in
Sussex. I’ll be doing a lot of work on that in the next year.

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SHORTS Vol.1

The Ship Breakers - Breaking gigantic ships by hand is dangerous and gruelling work. Many workers are children. The wages are low. ( This story received Honorable Mention in the WFNB's short story competition) Lloyd and the Baby - A bachelor finds an abandoned baby. What does he do with it? The Shattered Figurine - Detective Josephine (Jo) Naylor is told where to find the next body with a plea to help the killer stop this madness. The Two Grumpy Old Man Cafe - The meals are delicious, the atmosphere perfect and the insults are free. Available at Amazon. Please CLICK on the book cover.

SHORTS Vol.2

Five engaging short stories that will keep you wanting more by this author. *Four Boxes of Memories – Lloyd Minister moves to a nursing home with his most important possessions and he can’t take everything with him. *Reaching the Pinnacle - Grandfather and granddaughter hike the highest mountain in their province. Around the campfire, the young lady has something important to tell her Gramps. *Pioneers in a Hurry - A fond recollection of three grown men acting like boys on an all-night camping trip. Being mischievous comes naturally. *Near Dead - Detective Jo Naylor finds herself in the dark. She’s not alone. Someone wants her dead. *Six Jutlands and a Conestoga - The Verhoeven family have everything they own in a wagon, children and all. The mysterious west beckons. Available at Amazon. Please click on the book cover.

SHORTS Vol.3

Letting Go - a son deals with his deceased father's "boxes of memories". One Bedroom Ark - Noah Coyne owns a convenience story, the last customer of the night will change his life. Two Boys, One Wagon and a Secret - In the 50's, a young boy's pride was a red wagon. What do they discover one day when they are out filling it up with returnables? No Dying Today - Det. Jo Naylor and her partner search for the man that tried to kill her last night. The Food Bank - some people have too much food, others not enough.Available at Amazon. Please CLICK on the book cover.

Blooger's Award.

Thank you Susan Toy.

Family and Friends.

Nieces Pam Cottrell and Jackie Beers

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What's New?

Please check out the new Detective Jo Naylor serialization on the Page bar above. New additions coming soon. Follow the story here on the Scribbler.

Paperback copies of Dark Side of a Promise are available at Chapters - Regent Mall, Fredericton, NB. Cover to Cover in Riverview, NB. And from the Author.

Allan Hudson

About Me

My mother taught me to read, to like books, when I was very young. She also taught me how to write. I grew up in the country, even went to a one-room school which was right across the road from our house. She was the teacher. The days I missed were few. I enjoy reading and some of my favorite authors are Bryce Courtenay, Beth Powning, Dennis LeHane, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cara Brookins, Susan Toy, Jason Lawson, Lockie Young, Chuck Bowie, Harlan Coben, Leon Uris and Herman Wouk.Writing is so much fun and even though I started later in life, I am so happy to realize my dream. Having this blog so I can share other people's work gives me great pleasure.

I've had many adventures in my life. I've travelled throughout North America, gone skydiving, rock climbing, wilderness camping. I craft stained glass and I enjoy woodworking. I'm blessed with many good friends. I live in the seaside community of Cocagne, New Brunswick, Canada. My wife's name is Gloria. My son's name is Adam and my stepsons' names are Christopher (Mireille) and Mark (Nathalie) Young. My grandchildren are Matthieu, Natasha and Damien. I love them all.Thank you for visiting. I hope you enjoy my blog. You can reach me by leaving a comment and/or your email address below and I'll respond.

A new Drake Alexander novel

Coming soon...

The Douglas Kyle Memorial Award for Fiction

My story - The Ship Breakers - received Honorable Mention in the Douglas Kyle Memorial awards for New Brunswick Writers Federation's short story category. It's featured in SHORTS Vol.1

The Dark Side of a Promise

Dark Side of a Promise is an edgy, international thriller. A tale of Revenge! Drake Alexander follows the trail of one of the world’s deadliest men which leads him to the unlikeliest locations – Bangladesh, the country of rivers. Bartolo Rizzato murdered his best friend’s sister. Why is he in Asia? It can only be to steal or kill! When Alexander finds him, will he deliver on his promise? (Go to comment box in Novel section above to see what one reader says about the novel) Only $4.99 from Amazon. Please CLICK on the book cover.